Related papers: Walking droplets, swimming microbes: on memory in …
We report a new type of fluid-based driven dissipative oscillator system consisting of a lattice of millimetric fluid droplets bouncing on a vertically vibrating liquid bath and bound within an annular ring. We characterize the system…
Colloids coupled to a bath of swimming cells generically display enhanced diffusion. This transport dynamics stems from a subtle interplay between the active and passive particles that still resists our understanding despite decades of…
The encapsulation of active particles, such as bacteria or active colloids, inside a droplet gives rise to nontrivial shape dynamics and droplet motility. To understand this behavior, we derive an asymptotic solution for the fluid flow…
Couder and Fort discovered that droplets walking on a vibrating bath possess certain features previously thought to be exclusive to quantum systems. These millimetric droplets synchronize with their Faraday wavefield, creating a macroscopic…
We consider two minimal models of active fluid droplets that exhibit complex dynamics including steady motion, deformation, rotation and oscillating motion. First we consider a droplet with a concentration of active contractile matter…
Bacterial assemblies exhibit rich collective behaviors that control their biological functions, making them a relevant object of study from an active matter physics perspective. Dense bacterial suspensions self-organize into distinct…
Undulatory locomotion of microorganisms like soil-dwelling worms and spermatozoa, in structured environments, is ubiquitous in nature. They navigate complex environments consisting of fluids and obstacles, negotiating hydrodynamic effects…
We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Microbiology is the science of microbes, particularly bacteria. Many bacteria are motile: they are capable of self-propulsion. Among these, a significant class execute so-called run-and-tumble motion: they follow a fairly straight path for…
Hypothesis: Bacterial contamination of surfaces poses a major threat to public health. Designing effective antibacterial or self-cleaning surfaces requires understanding how bacteria-laden droplets interact with solid substrates and how…
A particle subject to successive, random displacements is said to execute a random walk (in position or some other coordinate). The mathematical properties of random walks have been very thoroughly investigated, and the model is used in…
We study a random walk model in which the jumping probability to a site is dependent on the number of previous visits to the site, as a model of the mobility with memory. To this end we introduce two parameters called the memory parameter…
The problem of a random walk in a disordered media is mapped into a model of a random walk with memory. The latter model, as opposed to the former one, does not make reference to a particular realization of the disorder. The equivalence of…
This is the companion paper of the Fluid Dynamics Video "The short life of a drop" where it is argued that the geometry of the sediment of a drop of water with particles in suspension can be correlated with the dynamics of the fluid inside…
Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…
A liquid droplet is placed on a rotating helical fiber. We find that the droplet may slide down, attach or climb up the fiber. We inspect experimentally the domain of existence of these three behaviors as a function of the geometrical…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
We study bacterial diffusion in disordered porous media. Interactions with obstacles, at unknown locations, make this problem challenging. We approach it by abstracting the environment to cell states with memoryless transitions. With this,…
Microorganisms are ubiquitous in nature and technology. They inhabit diverse environments ranging from small river tributaries and lakes to oceans, as well as wastewater treatment plants and food manufacturing. In many of these…